Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Afghan Oil Fields Aren’t a Curse – Yet

By Graeme Wood November 14, 2011 10:57 amNovember 14, 2011 10:57 am

SAR-E POL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government has a knack for botching everything: if Afghan officials were cooks, as the saying goes, they could ruin rice. The Chinese, by contrast, have an impressive record over the last couple of decades, and their achievement in the sphere of rice-cooking goes without mentioning.

So there was reason for more optimism than is usual in Afghan business deals in September, when the Afghan Ministry of Mines agreed to a partnership with the Chinese National Petroleum Company to extract oil in the basin of the Amu Darya River, in northern Afghanistan. Will the Chinese knack for business cancel out the Afghan anti-knack? The agreement, which is the first international oil deal in the country since well before the Taliban era, is a noteworthy test case. If it holds — and all indications suggest it will — it could draw hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to the area around Afghanistan’s northern border with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and create thousands of jobs for Afghans (and Chinese).
There is some reason for pessimism, of course. Last year, when a Pentagon memo surmised that Afghanistan’s mineral deposits might be worth as much as one trillion dollars, the prevailing reaction was something like resigned despair. Woe to the country cursed by resources — the last thing Afghans need is more to fight over. Then again, how much worse can things get? There is hardly a mineral-rich hellhole on the planet whose standard of living Afghans wouldn’t gladly trade for their own.

But the preliminary resource exploration going on in northern Afghanistan suggests that even if Afghanistan is beset by a thousand curses, the curse of resource wealth is not yet among them. In the short term, oil exploration may even be one of the few stabilizing elements of the Afghan economy. “The oil fields are an opportunity for everyone in this place,” Nazar Mohammad, the geologist who oversees oil and gas exploration in the area of Sheberghan for the Ministry of Mines, told me when I accompanied an Afghan delegation to Sar-e Pol early this month. “We will have jobs. We will have security.”

The region under exploration is among Afghanistan’s safest. It lies between the northern cities of Mazar-e Sharif and Maimana, and its population skews toward Uzbeks and Hazaras, and away from Pashtuns, who constitute the bulk of antigovernment fighters. The nearest big city, Sheberghan, is the stronghold of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Afghan Uzbek politician who has enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the government of Hamid Karzai and who stands accused of war crimes for allegedly killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of Taliban prisoners in Dasht-e Leili in December of 2001.

The Afghans and their Chinese partners face an easier time setting up their operation here than if the oil lay under the whizzing bullets of Kunar. Still, the Afghan government’s preparations to protect its assets are visible already, perhaps a year before any oil will be pumped. When the Afghan government is serious, and when there is money on the line, evidently it is capable of rousing itself to action.

The skyline along the road from the town of Sar-e Pol to the rural site of the oil fields is dotted with large polygonal towers, newly built to accommodate uniformed security forces. The Ministry of Mines is employing locals as guards to ensure tranquility in the area before hundreds of Chinese engineers and managers arrive next year. Primitive refineries stocked with Russian drilling equipment left over from the 1990s have not been looted or stripped for metal parts; thanks to protection by the local guards, they are intact, with plates in Cyrillic still affixed to the gauges.

The Afghan national government is famously flimsy outside of Kabul, in the areas where local potentates, or more often anarchy, rule the roads. Here among the oil fields in the north is one of the few places where the trend runs in reverse. The Kabul government is granting local bureaucrats like Nazar Mohammad their wish that local people be employed and wealth spread around. During our visit to Sheberghan, there were few mentions of Dostum, who was reportedly away in Uzbekistan at the time. The meetings in Mohammad’s office took place not under the Uzbek’s portrait but under those of Karzai and the late Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Kabul seems to be using the Chinese involvement in this project to create an alliance with local people in the Amu Darya basin, cutting out regional strongmen like Dostum. Even if the area grows richer as a result, that success won’t make the country’s south or east any safer. But for now, this alliance is one of the few ways in which the Afghan government has made itself unambiguously stronger outside its capital.